Your thoughts on Halo 4?

[Buizel91]

After getting the game yesterday, and completing it on Normal (6 hours, on heroic and legendary it will probably be a good 10+ hours depending on my luck) i was left pretty satisfied, the ending (not going to spoil it) nearly made me cry, not going to lie, this is definitely the most emotional Halo has been these past years. And finally, the Chief says more than "Yes sir" he actually gets a fair bit of dialogue, which brings him away from being a near mute.

Multiplayer (which is downloaded from the second disc onto your harddrive, this is probably the reason why the story is a told better, as Multiplayer and Single Player aren't compact in one disk) is good to, using Halo 3 and Reach mechanics, Now In Halo Reach, credits were also your exp. Now in Halo 4, Exp is Exp again and credits are now earned by ranking up the levels, which is good, keeps the hardcore players and casual satisfied, good one 343 ^^ being able to customize your loadouts is nice to (Tip: Prometheon Vision is awesome)

Forge what little i have played feels great, and a nice improvement on Halo Reach's Forge mode, now if only they would add a huge map or 2 like Reach did...

Spartan Ops is actually very good as well, the missions are short, but you get little episodes as you complete them, which last a little over 5 minutes i think, wasn't really counting, the first one is amazing and i have yet to unlock the others, if you are thinking it's like Modern Warfares spec ops missions, think again, these are 10x better.

Sure the game has it's flaws, but in my eyes they are nitpicks (The blurry vision you get as Cortana gets more rampant, The Captain of the Infinity, Covanent/Human Ammo being a little scarce in the last few missions and the Covanent aren't really explained as to why and how they are there, what happened to the truce?! (unless it was explained and i was drooling somewhere)But i can look past them. I'm not going to say the game is perfect, no game is, but it is no short of awesome, and great fun if you are familiar with the series, however if your not a fan, and didn't like the idea of the Chief being a near mute, and the game not being "dark enough" try Halo 4, some may say it's a cash in, but the story telling of this game is amazing, and very easy to follow, no major plot holes as far as i can tell, the game can get a little silly, but lets be fair, i would rather a little silly than trying to be serious. At least this game is a nice colourful FPS instead of MW/Battlefield/Warfighter which is pretty much, Grey, Brown and little bits of green here and there.

Have any of you guys played/completed it yet? What you think of it? Better/worse than Bungie? got any interesting stories to tell from MP?

 

[skywolfblue]

The game was pretty darn good in my opinion. The environments, the pretty graphics, the chief speaking out of cutscenes, etc etc.

A few niggly bits:

- The high-pitched ringing noise when shields are low. Am I the only one that can hear this? It's painful! It's manageable if I turn the sound down, but then it gets hard to hear the talking.

- Lack of promethean unit variety. Every time I faced prometheans I got this feeling of "ugg, more bad guys I'll just have to wade through" instead of "Yay!". I never really felt that way about covenant because their wide unit variety always made each fight more unique and interesting instead of a slog.

 

[RadioactiveMicrobe]

Halo 4 isn't Halo anymore.

343i took what made Halo multiplayer great, and just kind of tossed that out the window. (The ting is the phrase, "A well-coordinated team can always beat better individual players.")

 

[NinjaDeathSlap]

Loved the campaign despite it being rather short. My Xbox Live connection is playing up at the moment though so I haven't had the chance to delve into War Games or Spartan Ops yet.

 

[Korten12]

Halo 4 isn't Halo anymore.

343i took what made Halo multiplayer great, and just kind of tossed that out the window. (The ting is the phrase, "A well-coordinated team can always beat better individual players.")

What? I have played a lot of Halo 4 and in all of the objective modes, those who work together vs those who go lone wolf beat the lone wolves each time.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

Halo 4 isn't Halo anymore.

343i took what made Halo multiplayer great, and just kind of tossed that out the window. (The ting is the phrase, "A well-coordinated team can always beat better individual players.")

What? I have played a lot of Halo 4 and in all of the objective modes, those who work together vs those who go lone wolf beat the lone wolves each time.

gotta agree with this, went over to a buddies to play it and we made sure to stay much more tactical rather than just run and gun, and we smoked the other team once we really got our bearings (i still don't know the maps and how everything functions, so we were a bit slow sometimes in optimizing where to go/what to do.)

It's definitely different, but it is also definitely of the halo franchise, a few things i don't like, but they are heavily outweighed by the good.

 

[Buizel91]

Loved the campaign despite it being rather short. My Xbox Live connection is playing up at the moment though so I haven't had the chance to delve into War Games or Spartan Ops yet.

You can play Spartan Ops in single player

 

[Buizel91]

Halo 4 isn't Halo anymore.

343i took what made Halo multiplayer great, and just kind of tossed that out the window. (The ting is the phrase, "A well-coordinated team can always beat better individual players.")

Halo 4 is Halo, it's just different, as someone else said, a team that works together can defeat the lone wolves, easily, the multiplayer is much more fast paced as well which admittedly it can a little hectic, but it's still good.

 

[Lionsfan]

So far it's shaping up to be my least favorite Halo game.

Campaign- The interactions between Chief and Cortana were good, but holy balls that ending sucked. When you tack that onto the relative shortness of it all, and the fact that the whole thing was more about questions than answers....well I was not a happy dude when I finished it.

Multiplayer- This is the one that really bothers me. It feels like they're imitating Call of Duty and Battlefield way way way too much. Jumping into the middle of games (I lost my first 5 games because I was dropped into games onto losing teams that had no chance of coming back), the stupid scoring system (what was wrong with just using kills as the score?), and the stupid ordances, which means the multiplayer isn't about learning the map and where the weapons are anymore. Plus the loadouts are silly too. I was placed into games with guys who had DMR's and BR's as their starting weapons, and I was stuck with an Assault Rifle and a Magnum, I was at a huge disadvantage because I hadn't started the same time as everyone else.

I mean the basic Halo gameplay is there, but the stuff I don't like far outweighs the stuff I like

 

[Fijiman]

Overall I love the game. However, there are a few things that I don't like as much. As Lionsfan said, multiplayer can be fairly unbalanced, especially when you're going up against guys who are on for like twelve hours a day when you only average a few hours a week. They also seem to have either taken out the coordinates editing Reach had, or hidden it really well. I loved that feature in Forge because it took most of the guess work out made it extremely easy to make pieces symmetrical on a map.

 

[PromethianSpark]

I haven't played the game yet, Dam amazon screwing me over with the delivery. However, I have watched hours of streams and the whole campaign. Personally I am not really impressed. I get the impression that many people think its great only because it attempts to salvage 'Halo' from Reach, but it doesn't nearly go far enough, and has in other areas made it more like call of duty!

In my honest opinion, halo started going downhill the moment 343 industries started interfering in bungie's creation (they where basically bungies overseers for microsoft). The effects where slightly noticable in halo 3 multiplayer, but it was still all in all the last true halo game. Where its effect was really felt was in the overall direction of the story. I don't give a rats ass what the fan boys say, I am 100% sure that bungie intended the humans to be the forerunners, and microsoft couldn't allow this, because it would of effectly wrapped up the a human stroy line at the end of Halo 3. Of course a great Halo 4 game could of followed the arbitor and half jaw as they struggle agaisn't the brutes and the remaining covenant to free their home world. But microsoft couldn't allow this either. You see once a franchise develops a hardcore fan base , the logical next step is to fuck those fans in the ass. Not because you want to, but because you wish to broaden the appeal of it. A halo story line that followed the arbiter excvulsively could not appeal to the FPS idiots who had a hard enough time dealing with the whole space thing, and you know, story, to begin with. No, it needs humans so thick ppl could relate to them when we change the core mechanics of our game to be be like the shitty games they play. And boy did they go to town in changing the underlying halo experience to appeal to people who never really got the series to begin with, all at the expense of the true fans

 

[Binkan]

The one thing I didn't like with Halo4 is how they changed MCs armor to the new Spartan4 armor i personally think that the armor he had was what made him Master Chief and there was almost no interaction with the other spartan 4s during campaign but overall i think it's a good game and i like the change in Chief aswell from when it started in Halo3 to Halo4.

 

[wolf thing]

the multiplayer is great and graphics are also great. but the story was shit, it was full of plot holes and unanswered questions and was overall badly written,

 

[TheColdHeart]

I'm not that far into the campaign but so far it's alright, although I do think it 'feels' different to the Bungie games.
Only got a few niggles so far. I'm playing on normal and I seem to be dying an awful lot compared to the other games. If you go slow Cortana always tells you to hurry up to the next objective but if you rush in you die as you don't seem to be able to tank as much as before. It also feels like I'm constantly scrounging for ammo or changing weapons because I'm on empty which can often lead to me wielding odd weapon combos.

Not done a great deal of multiplayer either but seems standard but with those drop things and the mechs on Ragnarok which I don't like. Have they removed a standard every man for himself 'deathmatch' from the playlists? As whilst on the menu I only saw team games (unless I'm being blind).

 

[PromethianSpark]

A point on the campaign. The dialogue is completely broken!

 

[C F]

Loved the campaign despite it being rather short. My Xbox Live connection is playing up at the moment though so I haven't had the chance to delve into War Games or Spartan Ops yet.

You can play Spartan Ops in single player

Actually, you have to have a LIVE connection to start it up. I know this because mine's unusually flighty at the moment and unless I'm in someone else's lobby, I'll disconnect after 10 seconds. Makes it hard to review the challenges and decide on a course of action. And the thing that bugs me is I didn't get the Mjolnir Mark VI armor after soloing the campaign on legendary (I'm assuming because I was offline while doing so). But that's neither here nor there.

But yeah. The campaign was solid. I have a few thoughts on how it could have gone better, but half of them are just fanboy projections on what I wanted to happen. The biggest contender on the other half:
Lack of a boss fight outside of a QTE. I mean, I know he abuses his telekinetic constraint field like a pansy, but perhaps there could have been a way for Cortana to disable it, then fight him like the Arbiter did with Tartarus?

Spartan Ops are fun, but brief. Maybe once they come out with more episodes...

War games flows quickly. Sometimes I ride the flow like a champin' player, and sometimes I am left in the dust wondering "what just happened?" It's definitely a blend of Halo and Call of Duty, and I'm not quite sure what to make of that. Flood mode's fun, but I'm sorely missing Grifball.

Forge is pretty much the Halo: Reach forge: version 1.2, which is fine by me. All in all, the game is borderline amazing.

 

[BBboy20]

Despite having multiple studios and years to work by, somehow, it was still short and 343, despite being a collection of vets, still made rookie mistakes. Was making the best graphics possible the reason for it? Maybe the industry need to start evaluating rather graphics are worth sacrificing even 10 hours of gameplay.

Every time, I see a kill cam, I can't help but notice that Halo has basically given up and let COD win and if what used to be one of COD's major competitors just stop competing with it, what does that say for shooters in the future?

It's an odd situation because it doesn't really take away the quality (mostly) but it's something I may never get used to.

But, for Halo 5, if 343 actually wants to have the Combat Evolve, it may have to start having our Spartans act like Spartans; they've been teasing that starting with sprinting as normal or the QTEs in campaign but...it never does quite go all the way when, despite being a Spartan, you still catch your breath and that you're still pressing buttons COD/everyone else style? If they want to differentiate from Bungie, they're going to start making Halo become a lot more immersive, actually able to do all the cool stuff that have been stuck in cut-scenes and other fiction because I honestly can't see 343 keep Halo at even 80 percent Bungie style of FPS mechanics.

Also, next time, at least try have a level or two that actually take place on a ring installation next time?

 

[JokerboyJordan]

Hate the multi-player. Too fast paced, too much emulating Call of Duty, especially with perks like "faster reload speed" and, "carry a second primary weapon".

Too many options in Loadouts. Battle Rifle, DMR, Carbine, Light Rifle. Assault Rifle, Storm Rifle, Suppressor. Why the hell do we need 3 variations of each gun?

Forerunner guns are either pointless re-skins, like the Suppressor and Light Rifle. Or overpowered, like the Boltshot and Incinerator Cannon. The Scattershot is just a terrible gun.

Armour Abilities have gotten more pointless, there is little reason to use something other than Promethean Vision.

Guns are unsatisfying, and their recognizable sounds have been removed.

Also, Ordinance has lead to less knowledge of the map and less structuring around choke points. On vehicle based maps, vehicles are sometimes impossible to take down with normal guns, and the lack of guaranteed spawns can leave a team defenceless.

That is all.

Oh, and the lack of lunge with the sword, seriously, FUCK YOU 343!